Reverse Flotilla Folly

I read this whole article, and the whole time I kept saying to myself- This will never work, and they shouldn't even try. It took me a while, though, to figure out why I thought that, but then I got it.

Here's why this won't work:

It's juvenile, and I'm surprised Sullivan endorses it. To me it's symptomatic of the idiocy that rules the educated mind. The notion that running a flotilla to expose Turkey's hypocricy will have any effect is ridiculous. It postulates that there is some objective arbiter sitting somewhere who will pass impartial judgment on a political situation. This is a fantasy. There is no doctoral thesis board or Poli-Sci professor sitting somewhere on the equator passing good judgment and doling out reward for good points. We don't live in a world of deans and panels, we live in a world of people. And people act based on interests not on moral gotcha points.

So the flotilla will arrive in Turkey, and what will happen exactly? All of the Europeans and the rest of the Muslim world will issue some sort of decree condemning Turkey and then suddenly take the pressure off of Israel about Gaza? This is in sane. People aren't really that mad about Gaza. It is a convenient (and largely appropriate) front for their anger at Israel in general. Israel has many, many enemies, whereas Turkey has few. And Turkey's allies will - as the US has done for Israel - largely parse and downplay the Kurdish situation there, and then get right back on the offensive against their common enemy. This silly intellectual exercise in foreign expose will yield no results. It is childish and exhibits the worst of small-minded intellectualism divorced from realpolitik. Even, heaven forbid, if they are all killed, sympathy from the larger world will be minimal, and Israel will be forced into a war which will immediately obviate any gains from the stunt.